This is exactly how these people are portraying it, end of the world and we’re destroying the planet, sounds a lot like the global warming warnings that we’ve gotten over the last 20 years. The warmers believe that up to one-third of the species on earth are about to die. Michael Crichton had a great analogy once, a great comparison to the global warming crowd and religious believers. The similarities. There was a Garden of Eden. There is sin. There’s destruction. There’s a rapture. There’s all of this, even though the global warming people claim not to have a religion. But TIME Magazine is having a lot of fun here mocking these Christians. But are they any more deluded than the people who believe so devoutly in manmade global warming? [No -- Ed] As I say, these comparisons are fascinating, global warming and these end of the earth guys, it’s almost identical.

* * *

Speaking of global warming, the New York Daily Newshad a story, this is from last summer, and just surfacing here from our archives. Just to put some of this stuff in perspective. Last summer, “Documents released Friday by the Nixon Presidential Library show members of President Richard Nixon’s inner circle discussing the possibilities of global warming more than 30 years ago.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan walked into Nixon’s office and told him that we’re going nuts producing carbon dioxide, the world’s temperature the next 30 to 50 years could rise by seven degrees, we’re gonna have sea levels going nuts, parts of America in 30 years will be underwater. Nixon was told this, documents just released. Again, this story is from last summer, from the Nixon library.”Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notable as a Democrat in the administration, urged the administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming came to the public’s attention. There is widespread agreement that carbon dioxide content will rise 25 percent by 2000, Moynihan wrote in a September 1969 memo.” This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by seven degrees by the year 2000. This, in turn, could raise the level of the sea by ten feet. Good-bye New York. Good-bye Washington, for that matter. Nixon was warned that New York and Washington would be underwater because of carbon dioxide, in 1970. What a hoax. What a fraud. And look how it ensnared all kinds of people.

Five years later is when Newsweek is doing its cover on the coming ice age,1975. Moynihan was Nixon’s counselor for urban affairs from January of 1969 through December of 1970. I mean, if anything, we know that the earth’s temperature by 2000 had not risen seven degrees Fahrenheit and New York and Washington were not underwater and not even close. None of it was true.

A 1930s scare film such as Reefer Madness was seen as high camp by liberals by the time the 1970s rolled around, as were Jack Webb’s anti-communist efforts of the late ’1950s. But seventies liberals, perhaps spurred on by the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock, if not the actual contents, had plenty of fears of their own, and wanted you to share the cold sweat of their own brand of paranoia.

Recall the horrific slate of politically-oriented science fiction films that Hollywood churned out in-between 1968′s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1977′s Star Wars. Films such asSoylent Green, Silent Running and ZPG were obsessed with the Malthusian nightmares of overpopulation and deforestation that dominated the overculture of the time. Rollerball depicted a world controlled by giant corporations, at precisely the same time that Steve and Woz were cobbling together the first Apples in their Bay Area garage. They were followed by Leonard Nimoy’s cheesy synthesizer-scored In Search Of TV series a few years later, which explored Global Cooling, Killer Bees, Deadly Ants, and other ’70s obsessions.

Today, these ’70s efforts are seen as equally campy as Refer Madness became three or four decades after its release. The eco-doomsday films of the naughts, such as The Day After Tomorrow, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, and Al Gore’s own An Inconvenient Truth are well on the way to becoming late night camp TV themselves, and at much faster rate as their equally schlocky predecessors.

Perhaps someone can recut Al’s film and dub it “Climate Madness.” Maybe hire William Shatner to cut an exaggerated Jack Webb-style parody opening.

Who knows: “Climate Madness” could eventually even have the same impact on its genre as his wife Tipper’s efforts to curb raunchy lyrics in pop music.

I wonder if at least one portion of the left may suddenly start taking global warming hoaxes a bit more seriously, now that Gaia worship and Ganja worship have just intersected.

Also in the news of doomsday prognostications, ”Rising sea levels, desertification and shrinking freshwater supplies will create up to 50 million environmental refugees by the end of the decade, experts warn today,” the Guardian reported.

Pensioners burn books for warmth

Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13ºC in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6ºC in London, -5ºC in Birmingham and -7ºC in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite.

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.

Since January 2008, gas bills have risen 40 per cent and electricity prices 20 per cent, although people over 60 are entitled to a winter fuel allowance of between £125 and £400.

Jonathan Stearn, energy expert for Consumer Focus, said: ‘If pensioners are taking such desperate measures to heat their homes it is shocking. With low wholesale prices and increasing profit margins, there is clearly room for energy companies to make price cuts immediately.’

Ruth Davison, of the National Housing Federation, said: ‘The spiralling cost of energy means heating homes has become a luxury rather than a necessity for many people – particularly the elderly, low paid and unemployed.’

But in addition to Ray Bradbury’s famous dystopian novel (which previously echoed more than a little in last year’s Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act story), it’s also the alpha and the omega of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, now celebrating its secondanniversary. The rulers of National Socialist Germany burned books because they were frightened by their content; the citizens of socialist England burn books because of their nation’s whackadoodle environmentally correct energy policies.

And speaking of which, great “Final Countdown” find by Sonic Frog.net:

Prince Charles: Eighteen months

to stop climate change disaster

The Prince of Wales has warned that the world faces a series of natural disasters within 18 months unless urgent action is taken to save the rainforests.

In one of his most out-spoken interventions in the climate change debate, he said a £15 billion annual programme was required to halt deforestation or the world would have to live with the dire consequences.

“We will end up seeing more drought and starvation on a grand scale. Weather patterns will become even more terrifying and there will be less and less rainfall,” he said.

The P.C. prince made the above claim in May of 2008. (He would make yet another final final countdown this past summer, and no doubt, there are more to come.) Those eighteen months he warned us about so portentiously have now passed.

Pensioners burn books for warmth

Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13ºC in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6ºC in London, -5ºC in Birmingham and -7ºC in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite.

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.

Since January 2008, gas bills have risen 40 per cent and electricity prices 20 per cent, although people over 60 are entitled to a winter fuel allowance of between £125 and £400.

Jonathan Stearn, energy expert for Consumer Focus, said: ‘If pensioners are taking such desperate measures to heat their homes it is shocking. With low wholesale prices and increasing profit margins, there is clearly room for energy companies to make price cuts immediately.’

Ruth Davison, of the National Housing Federation, said: ‘The spiralling cost of energy means heating homes has become a luxury rather than a necessity for many people – particularly the elderly, low paid and unemployed.’

But in addition to Ray Bradbury’s famous dystopian novel (which previously echoed more than a little in last year’s Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act story), it’s also the alpha and the omega of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, now celebrating its secondanniversary. The rulers of National Socialist Germany burned books because they were frightened by their content; the citizens of socialist England burn books because of their nation’s whackadoodle environmentally correct energy policies.

And speaking of which, great “Final Countdown” find by Sonic Frog.net:

Prince Charles: Eighteen months

to stop climate change disaster

The Prince of Wales has warned that the world faces a series of natural disasters within 18 months unless urgent action is taken to save the rainforests.

In one of his most out-spoken interventions in the climate change debate, he said a £15 billion annual programme was required to halt deforestation or the world would have to live with the dire consequences.

“We will end up seeing more drought and starvation on a grand scale. Weather patterns will become even more terrifying and there will be less and less rainfall,” he said.

The P.C. prince made the above claim in May of 2008. (He would make yet another final final countdown this past summer, and no doubt, there are more to come.) Those eighteen months he warned us about so portentiously have now passed.

Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales has warned in a grandstand speech which set out his concerns for the future of the planet.

The heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night thathe had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.(that leaves only 96 months for the Goracle to line his pockets -ed.) And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the “age of convenience” was over.

If the Senate doesn’t pass a bill to cut global warming, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer says, there will be dire results: droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening air pollution and more.

Uh-huh. Will disease, pestilence, cats and dogs living together, Zuul and a giant Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man also result? (Hey, just speaking satire to power.)

Update: Mark Steyn uses Prince Charles’ doomsday claptrap as the jumping off point for his latest op-ed. Needless to say, read the whole thing — but hurry; we have only have ten years to save the oceans, as Ted Danson said over twenty years ago. (More not-so-final countdowns here.)

“Leading climate expert Jim Hansen” (no relation, as far as we can tell, to a deceased but global warmingly remembered Muppet expert) believes “Barack Obama has only four years to save the world.”

Of course he does. But we give Mr. Hanson bonus points for eschewing the leisurely and far overdone bourgeois pace of the ten year countdown–four isn’t a number that’s picked all that often from the proverbial hat for a doomsday countdown. But in any case, file this one way for election time in 2012 if–and we think the odds are somewhat reasonable here–Mr. Hanson is wrong.

Today is the official publication date of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The release of this book was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s once exceedingly popular “The Population Bomb” in 1968. If you expect to see much about either of these books in the mainstream media, you are in for a big disappointment. The MSM is avoiding the whole subject of Paul Ehrlich and his apocalyptic “The Population Bomb” like the plague nowadays. The reason is probably because it might draw embarrassing attention to the fact that apocalyptic visions, despite their popularity at one time such as the current global warming alarmism, are usually proven to be flat out wrong. Such was the case with Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” which the Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked as one of the 50 Worst Books of the 20th century due to its many errors.

Gladnick quotes from a Brothers Judd review of Ehrlich’s book that’s also well worth your time.

Given how easy it now is to find previous Final Countdowns, just once, I’d love to see the next Final Countdown met with some skepticism from the press: Mr. Gore/Erlich/Danson/DiCaprio, etc., why should we believe you, when there have been so many earlier doomsday predictions that have never come to pass?

For 15 months, I’ve been saving your respective front pages from the glorious weekend of January 27-28, 2007, when you simultaneously declared your mutual jihads against man-made global warming.

I knew they’d come in handy some day and now, they have.

Indeed, it seems like only yesterday I awoke to my Saturday, January 27, 2007 Globe to be greeted by the hysterical, front-page headline “Welcome to the new climate,” under a politically correct green masthead, declaring at the bottom: “We want action. We’re ready for sacrifices.”

Not to be outdone, the Star a day later had its own World War III, front-page headline, “State of denial: Do the skeptics of global warming have a hidden agenda?” — in the finest traditions of “do you deny beating your wife?” journalism.

And now, here we are, just 15 months later and isn’t it great you both have exactly what you wanted — skyrocketing gasoline prices and about-to-skyrocket food prices — since as we both know, hitting energy-hogging Canadians in their pocketbooks is the only way to make them reduce their evil greenhouse gas emissions hard and fast.

Back around 1988, I watched Ted Danson, then at the height of his fame as the star of Cheers appear on a late-night infomercial pitch for an environmental group. He ended the half-hour advertisement with his saying that “we only have ten years to save the world’s oceans”. (That’s a paraphrase, but as close as I remember the line.)

It’s a reminder that, with the exception of Hollywood’s greatest Greatest Generation-era stars (Cary Grant, Bogie, The Duke, Coop), Bill Whittle’s Lou Grant Effect is inviolable. Having a beer in Sam Malone’s bar while he recounts his glory days with the Sox sounds like infinitely more fun than listening to the doomsday prognostications of someone paid to recite lines written by others, with his performance calibrated by someone else.

But since the freshness date has long expired on Danson’s dire warning, and the oceans are, near as I can tell, all happily present and accounted for, there have been numerous additional Doomsday Countdowns, which always seem to run for a decade for some reason. Al Gore started his a year ago, and yesterday, aging man-child Leonardo Di Caprio and several accompanying B-list actors and musicians announced theirs.

Here are two extremely environmentally conscious sources who could immediately put their Boeings where their mouths are, and retire their privately-owned jumbo jets for Diet Cokes and a tiny bag of peanuts on Southwest.

Anytime now, fellas; we’re waiting…

And while we’re waiting, James Lileks has some very much related thoughts: “It’s a peculiar inversion: the height of civilization now consists of undoing the plug, not connecting it.”

Update: In 2005, I looked at the number of businesses leaving California for a pro-business climate and wrote, “Will the last person out of California please turn out the lights?”

Wouldn’t you feel better if it weren’t boy-men trying to save the world? They couldn’t talk Bruce Willis or Russell Crowe into this nonsense? I’m sorry, but I’m just not comfortable leaving the fate of the planet to Leo, Orlando, and Josh.If things are really as bad as Hollywood wants us to believe, shouldn’t any action that pollutes unnecessary to human survival cease? Like movie making? You can’t scream armageddon while moving forward on another Focker sequel. You just can’t.

No, you really can’t. If the earth really is doomed in ten years, then movie making–mere entertainment that no one outside of Beverly Hills needs to survive–should be stopped immediately, to prolong the environment as long as possible by eliminating all of its accompanying chemicals and pollution.